


Hair is Everything

by JinxQuickfoot



Series: Whumptoberverse [13]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Day 13, Gen, Hurt Tony Stark, James "Rhodey" Rhodes is a Good Bro, Kidnapping, Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark Friendship, Natasha Romanov Is a Good Bro, Not Canon Compliant, Protective Natasha Romanov, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Whump, Torture, Whumptober 2020, discussions of torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:14:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27409408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JinxQuickfoot/pseuds/JinxQuickfoot
Summary: It would have been better if it was a gun. Peter would have taken a nasty hit to the shoulder, but it would have been nothing that wouldn’t have healed within a few days. The thick, black, tar-like substance coated Tony from the head downwards a second before Peter tackled him, already scrabbling to get the stuff off his mentor’s face before it set.The kid was the only reason Tony didn’t suffocate right there in front of the cameras, the Avengers, and Scrabbles the twenty-four-year-old cat.----------------------------------------------------------------------------After an attack on Tony leads to him having to shave his head and eyebrows, Natasha steps in to save the day.
Relationships: Natasha Romanov & Tony Stark
Series: Whumptoberverse [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1921831
Comments: 55
Kudos: 179
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	Hair is Everything

**Author's Note:**

> Whumptober 2020 Day 13
> 
> Prompts: Delayed Drowning/Chemical Pneumonia/Oxygen Mask
> 
> Relationship: Tony & Natasha
> 
> Can be read as a standalone but exists in the same timeline as other works in the Whumptoberverse.
> 
> Inspired by [that speech](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q97iIDx-b7U&ab_channel=AmazonPrimeVideo) from Fleabag

They told the press it was a prank gone wrong.

For all they knew, it could have been, but Natasha had been in this business for too long to see it as anything but what it was; an attack.

It would have been worse if not for Peter.

They had been there for him, in one of the stupid puff pieces Pepper Potts had been setting up for months. And Natasha loved Pepper, and she knew why they were necessary, and she still clenched her teeth every time she had to sit through another awards ceremony, or fundraiser, or gala, and knew she shouldn’t complain because Tony and Pepper had been doing three times the amount of publicity work than the rest of them put together. That was by design. The former rogue Avengers had been strongly suggested to take a back seat, to stay out of sight except when they were participating in activities like taking out a bug-like alien army or attending a thank you ceremony for Spider-Man saving the state’s oldest cat from a ledge.

Because apparently they were at the point of using a literal Save the Cat, and Natasha was determined to smile and wave throughout the entire thing, until she could get back to Compound and kick Clint or Steve’s ass in the gym and burn the strappy heels their wardrobe consultant had pulled out of god know’s what so-called fashionable hell.

Natasha would kick herself for not taking him out sooner. He was suspicious enough already - sunglasses, black hoodie, oversized clothes - edging closer and closer to the stage where Tony was delivering a Pepper and Committee approved speech, something about ‘no good deed too small’ she knew Tony was deleting from his memory banks even as he was saying it. She had assumed their security could handle it. She had taken the risk that they would, instead of throwing herself at an innocent-until-proven-guilty civilian and messing up the good press Pepper had so meticulously put together.

Peter had no such qualms. The second the Hoodie was pulling something from his pocket, Peter was shoving Tony to the floor of the stage, a few seconds too late.

It would have been better if it was a gun. Peter would have taken a nasty hit to the shoulder, but it would have been nothing that wouldn’t have healed within a few days. The thick, black, tar-like substance coated Tony from the head downwards a second before Peter tackled him, already scrabbling to get the stuff off his mentor’s face before it set.

The kid was the only reason Tony didn’t suffocate right there in front of the cameras, the Avengers, and Scrabbles the twenty-four-year-old cat.

_It took them three days to find him, and it was three too many._

_They’d barely moved into the Tower, still rough and ragged around the edges, despite the ‘team bonding’ taking out an army of Chitauri and a god had provided them. They were still tiptoeing around each other, like new roommates in a college dorm, learning each other. She, Clint and Steve all still had S.H.I.E.L.D. housing in D.C., but Fury had insisted they take up Tony’s offer of rooms at Stark Tower until the dust had settled in New York._

_So they tip-toed and spoke polite words and were careful not to leave a single mark on their new communal space._

_All except Tony._

_It made sense, given it was his place to begin with, but the billionaire made it clear that that was no longer the case. He had insisted it was theirs. Natasha knew that that insistence had started off mostly for Bruce’s benefit, to make the physicist stop jumping every time someone official rounded a corner. But as time wore on, and it become more and more apparent that Loki had tainted Clint’s place in S.H.I.E.L.D. forever, and learning to use cellphones and the internet didn’t make Steve any less of a man out of a time, Tony had turned that insistence towards them as well. The Tower was their home._

_Natasha hadn’t believed it. But it was a nice fantasy to indulge in from time to time._

_It took a while, but it worked. Tony’s infectious energy combined with Steve’s insistence of the team spending time together outside of missions soon turned dinners and game nights from chores into highlights. They still fought and bickered and griped with each other, but over time there was less heat behind it, and the day Tony was taken it was like all life had been sucked from the Tower in one fell swoop._

_Later, they would say that they had been sloppy. That they had come to see themselves as invincible, ‘Earth’s Mightiest Heroes’, untouchable, unbreakable, and Tony’s wrecked and empty Audi on the side of the highway had been a sobering and urgent wakeup call._

_They didn’t sleep until they brought him home, soaked and shivering from the last round of waterboarding as they guided him onto the jet. They had been mid-torture session when Natasha had found them. It didn’t matter who they were._

_All that mattered is that Tony went home. They didn’t._

Their priority was getting the tar off Tony’s skin and eyes first.

Bruce was there the second Steve half-carried Tony into the med bay, blind and shivering and gagging. Whatever the black tar was, it stank of gasoline and sulfur and something else Natasha couldn’t and wouldn’t identify, because that wasn’t her job, and that wasn’t going to help.

As soon as Tony was in the med bay, she was back on the streets with Clint, Sam, and Scott, while Steve cajoled a reluctant Peter in front of the cameras to help him to deal with the damage in the press. Rhodey and Pepper took up vigil next to Tony’s hospital bed, talking him through what was happening, acting as his eyes while his were sealed shut.

Two days later, they issued a press statement saying all perpetrators for the incident had been caught. It wasn’t true. Hoodie was in holding, and wasn’t talking, and Steve wasn’t letting Natasha _persuade_ him unless the danger to Tony grew life-threatening. So she channeled her energy into finding out if he was the only one, or if he had friends, and where he had gotten the black tar that wasn’t tar from, and turned up nothing.

The latest update on Tony had been chemical pneumonia.

Bruce had collaborated with Cho and a desperate-to-help Peter to find a way to reduce the substance, which had hardened to something like cement, back into liquid form so they could scrape it off the rest of his body. They had him hooked up to an oxygen mask to prevent him breathing any more of it in, but it was still in contact with naked skin, and they didn’t know what damage it would do if left there long term.

Frustrated at not being able to find answers, Natasha went to see her downed teammate, finding him fast asleep, Rhodey passed out next to him. She would have smiled at the sight if the tar  didn’t make Tony look like a burned corpse from the waist up.

She plucked up his medical file, relieved at first to see that their resident scientists had seemed to have found a way to liquefy the tar, and then froze when she saw the last recommendation.

_To remove hazardous substance completely, recommended full shave of head and face._

_Tony had been doing better, back to his usual carefree attitude, even though Natasha could see right through it. She had cornered him one evening on the pretext of sharing an expensive bottle of vodka, and then had wheedled and massaged the conversation around to torture without blindsiding her teammate into panic. She had to know. And Tony had told her._

_It hadn’t mattered what they had wanted; all that mattered was that Tony hadn’t given it to them._

_“I didn’t think you would,” Natasha had said, after their third (fourth?) shot._

_Tony tried and failed to hide his surprise. “Well, you know me. I was never one for authority. Don’t take orders well. Although,” he poured them both another drink. “I do wish they would stop with the water-boarding. It happens to you one time and then everyone thinks it’s your worst fear. Rip out my fingernails, put me in an Iron Maiden, change it up a bit, you know?”_

_Natasha saw right past the nonchalant tone. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, making him meet her eyes. “It won’t happen again.”_

They had diluted and slopped away the substance over his eyes and skin, and it had taken hours. All that was left was taking out what was in his hair.

Natasha had cornered Cho, asking if anything could be done, why they couldn’t remove the substance from Tony’s hair the way they had his skin. Cho had laid out the facts for her, the choices she and Bruce had made, their reasons. Natasha had taken them in stride, walking in on him joking with Rhodey, words muffled by the oxygen mask still strapped over his face.

“We can use this, you know,” Tony was saying, breaking off with a hacking cough before gathering himself. “Tell everyone I had cancer. Play the sympathy vote.”

The joke was meant to be poor taste, but it fell flat anyway, even as Rhodey tried to play it off. “We could do it together. Have a ‘who wore it better’ contest.”

Natasha ran her hair over her own missing patch of hair, which still hadn’t fully grown back from her encounter with Gargan’s crew. She kept it tucked away under an artfully tied headscarf, but she still felt the loss. She still felt naked every time it was exposed.

It was a flaw. She wasn’t meant to have flaws.

Tony’s head had whipped around at Rhodey’s words, and they both knew he was serious - that he would shave in solidarity if it made Tony feel even an ounce better. 

He wouldn’t have to. Natasha wasn’t going to let that happen.

_It did happen again._

_This time, it was mission gone wrong somewhere that wasn’t quite Russia, when Natasha had awoken bruised and battered in a metal coffin._

_A rare bout of panic had flooded her until she had heard J.A.R.V.I.S.’s soothing voice in her ear and then the metal was lifting away from her and she was scrabbling out of an abandoned Iron Man suit, whose rightful owner was nowhere in sight._

_They found him faster this time, only a few hours passing before they were hauling him out of a locked room and onto a gurney, and a few hours more before they realized the danger hadn’t yet passed._

_Bruce became the fastest expert there had ever been on delayed drowning. He kept Tony calm and stable as they rushed him to S.H.I.E.L.D. medical. Later, Natasha pressed him before Fury could if he had given anything away to his captors._

_He hadn’t. She wasn’t surprised in the least._

It took some prodding to shift Rhodey out of Tony’s hospital room and promise not to shave anything, not just yet, before she returned to Tony’s bedside with a wheelchair. “We going on a field trip, red?”

Natasha didn’t answer, just helped her teammate out of bed and hooked up the oxygen tank up to the chair, wheeling him into the room she had prepared earlier.

Tony made a comment about torture and corpse disposal that was only half-joking as Natasha parked him in a white room with a drain in the floor using for chemical showers, strapping her a surgical mask over her face and snapping on a pair of gloves. Then his eyes slid over to the table she had prepared and he went stock still, figuring out immediately what she had prepared.

She knew Cho wouldn’t have offered this. It had taken a long discussion of risks and cost-benefit analysis with Bruce to get him to give her what she needed to do it. It wasn’t fatal; it wasn’t even that dangerous. It would just be long, and hard, and extremely painful.

_It became a ritual. After a long mission, when one of them got hurt, or taken, or make a mistake that cost them a little too much, they would gather in the kitchen with a bottle of vodka that Natasha suspected was neither of their favorites, but they drank it anyway, because it tasted like cool waters and made them feel warm._

_They were halfway down a bottle when Tony asked the question. “How would you do it?”_

_She had been expecting him to ask for a while. She was surprised he had taken so long, but she also knew a piece of him didn’t want to know the answer. No one really wanted to know the answer._

_She gave him an out. “Are you sure you want to know?”_

_Tony shifted in his seat, swirling the clear liquid around his glass, the ice long since melted. “Why not? Just because no one’s broken me, doesn’t mean I’m unbreakable. I know the old ‘Stark men are made of iron’ saying only goes so far. Even iron bends.”_

_Natasha took another drink. She was used to this question. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents would ask her constantly, if they got up the confidence, and she would lie to them. They never wanted to hear the truth. No one did._

_She surveyed Tony. Almost no one._

_“Torture isn’t one size fits all,” she started. “Everyone has their breaking point. But it’s different for every person. Take our team, for example.” She took a sip of the drink, not stalling, but giving the conversation the space it deserved. “Clint, I would make powerless. I would take away every single choice, even the smallest. Then I’d make him hurt others. I’d start with dogs. Then women. And I’d finish with kids.”_

_She met Tony’s eyes, one eyebrow raised, giving him permission to bow out. He didn’t._

_“Bruce, I’d do the opposite. I’d have him make every choice. I’d give him nothing but freedom and I’d throw civilians and friends in his way and made sure every choice he made hurt all of them anyway.”_

_“Jesus, Romanoff.” Tony topped off the ice in his drink, using it as a pretext to look away. “Alright, as we’re doing this. Tell me about Steve.”_

_“Steve is the easiest. Take the people he’s closest to. Kill them in front of him. Make sure he knew it was his fault. Then lock him away some place where he could never fight back again.”_

_“I’m sensing a pattern. We are a bunch of good Samaritans, aren’t we?” Tony poured them both another drink. They were further down the bottle than they had ever gotten before, but the conversation warranted it. “Ok, let me have it. What would you do to me?”_

She didn’t ask permission.

To ask permission would be to acknowledge why she was doing it. She wasn’t removing something life-threatening. This wasn’t medically recommended. She wasn’t saving his eyes or his skin or his lungs.

She was saving his hair.

She positioned him with his back to a basin, next to the medical trolley filled with the equipment she was going to need for this. Tony’s breathing picked up as she tipped his head back, still thick and crusted with solid black goo, holding a basin of treated water over his eyes. She hovered, still not asking, but giving him a chance to back out if he wanted to. He had to know what this was going to take. He had to have asked, if not Cho, then definitely Bruce. They wouldn’t have agreed to do it; to put a patient through that much pain for something they saw as so trivial.

Tony didn’t move. He didn’t stop her, didn’t give any sign he wanted to except clenching his hands around the arms of the wheelchair.

So Natasha got to work.

_“Well, I wouldn’t waterboard you. That clearly isn’t your weakness.”_

_“Do you mind writing into Bad Guy Weekly? Because that seems to be their go-to, and it’s getting old.” He wasn’t as casual as he was making out to be, pressing his toes into the lush carpet harder than necessary. “So what is it then? That thing you laid out for Steve sounded pretty rough.”_

_That_ definitely _wasn’t as casual as he was trying to made it sound, and for a brief moment, Natasha considered lying to him, as she had to so many who had asked this question. That was usually the answer people wanted to hear. I’d threaten the people you love. It’s your heart. It’s your kindness. That’s your ultimate weakness._

_“Don’t,” Tony said quietly, and Natasha must have had a few more shots than she had intended if Tony had managed to catch her out like that. “Don’t tell me what I want to hear.”_

_“Ok. Well, I wouldn’t do something physical. That’s what it is for some people. Rats, flaying, eye-gouging_. _Insects.”_

_“Not waterboarding.”_

_“Not waterboarding.” Natasha laid her drink aside, even as she wanted to pour herself another. “And I wouldn’t go after someone you loved either.”_

_She knew that would hurt, but he had asked her not to lie to her, so she hadn’t. He tried to play it off. “Pepper will be pleased to hear that.”_

_“I’m not saying you don’t care.” She shot him a small smile. “If someone laid a hand on Pepper, or Rhodey, or us, it wouldn’t break you. It would do the opposite. If you lost someone like that you’d turn the world upside down to get them back or you’d stop at nothing to avenge them.”_

_Tony was quiet for several moments before he said, “Well, that is in the job title.” This time he bypassed the glass altogether and took a swig right from the bottle. “Fine. No physical torture, no threatening the inner circle. So how would you break me?”_

They’d been at it an hour, and Tony hadn’t quit yet. They could only soften the tar up so much without doing permanent damage to the hair underneath, rendering the whole process useless. And it wasn’t just in his hair. It was in his brows and lashes and goatee as well.

She started by pouring the solution Bruce had prepared over his hair, softening the tar, but soon they reached the point that she had to submerge his face as well. And waterboarding may never have been Tony Stark’s breaking point but it was without doubt a trigger, and every new application of solution left him spluttering and gasping and grabbing onto her gloved and now chemical-laced wrists even as she slapped him away, eventually giving up and ripping off her headscarf to bind his hands behind him. The process from loosening the tar to removing it was time-sensitive. She didn’t have time to waste on comfort, and she knew that Tony wouldn’t want it anyway.

_“I’d humiliate you.”_

_The words hung in the air between them, neither of them acknowledging them, and neither of them changing the subject. Tony seemed to be teetering between the two options, but the vodka seemed to give him courage, because he chose to stay on topic. “You’d break me through embarrassment.”_

_“Humiliation,” Natasha corrected. “People underestimate it. But tell me; what moments do you think about the most? The ones where you got hurt? The ones were you were upset? Or the ones where you felt like a fool?”_

_Tony took that in. “Ok. Sure, yeah, I’ve had my fair share of sleepless nights thinking about the Spring Break of 1987 - the parts I don’t share with anyone past Rhodey. Ok, fine, you’d humiliate me. How?”_

It took two hours of dunking and rinsing for the tar to soften enough to remove, at which point Tony had rubbed his wrists raw from trying to wriggle out of the headscarf. He didn’t try to leave the chair though, and Natasha took that as permission to keep going; confirmation that this was still the least of two tortures.

Natasha started with her fingers, rubbing Tony’s scalp to loosen the tar further. She was cautious enough to not remove any of the hair, but she still had to pull and tug and rip apart the strands, yanking Tony’s head forward over a bucket and slopping the tar into it, ounce by ounce, the removal of each a battle.

It wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t clean. If it had been, Bruce would have done it. But Natasha had always had the stomach to do what others couldn’t. The skills to see what the worst of two pains would be.

_“I’d start with your vanity.”_

_Natasha met Tony’s gaze head-on, even as he was fighting to maintain eye contact at this point._

_“The fact that you’re squirming at me even mentioning it proves my point.”_

_Tony couldn’t deny it. He could only keep drinking. “I have been told I’m easy on the eyes.”_

_“I’d wreck you,” Natasha continued, her voice even. “I wouldn’t even cripple you in any major way. You’d just build your way out of that. No - I’d inflict scars that even the best surgeons in the world couldn’t reverse. I’d do it slowly, and I’d make you watch. I wouldn’t let you off the table while I did it. I wouldn’t clean you up. I’d let you lie in your own filth while I took you apart piece by piece.”_

_“Fuck,” Tony muttered. He’d curled into himself as she’d talked. She was sure he hadn’t noticed. “Is that it?”_

_“That’s how I’d start. Then I’d make it public.”_

_Tony’s knuckles went white around the vodka bottle._

_“Do you want me to stop?”_

_“Yes,” he admitted. “But don’t.”_

The tears started somewhere in the fourth hour. Natasha resolutely ignored them, but had unbound his hands when the struggling had finally abated. She’d given him a sponge to squeeze instead, shoved a towel in his mouth to bite down on. She was about a third of the way there.

_“I’d broadcast it. I’d make you beg me not to. Then I’d do it anyway. I’d make you see yourself as disgusting and pathetic and ugly and then I’d make the whole word see as it well. That’s how I’d break you.”_

_There was a long silence after she’d finished, which Natasha used to finish off her drink before tugging the bottle out of his hands to pour them both another. They were both drunk now, not a state that Natasha allowed herself to get in very often, but it was vodka, and good vodka. It gave her a heady buzz without dulling her senses, and she was in Tower, and she felt something close to safe._

_“You asked,” Natasha reminded him._

_“I did,” Tony agreed. “Well, I won’t ever be getting on your bad side.”_

_Natasha crossed the room, the spirits masking any awkwardness as she sunk next to him on the couch. “It doesn’t matter what you do. Ever. You’ll never be on my bad side. Ok?”_

Six hours in, and the bucket below Tony was filled for the eleventh time with rancid black water. Natasha’s gloved hands were coated in it. She’d gone through almost six heavy-duty pairs, shoving the rubber against Tony’s scalp until it was raw and then kept going. Most of the larger clumps of tar were gone, but there were still molecules trapped in the individual hairs. The heavy-duty gloves were too thick for that, so she changed to disposable ones as she began to move over his scalp yet again, pulling and twisting and wheedling out every particle, and when fingers were no longer enough she’d gone in with brush and comb and hadn’t held back.

_“It’s not something to be ashamed about,” Natasha said quietly._

_“Textbook narcissist, remember? I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was. And like you said; I did ask.”_

_He reached for the bottle again but Natasha caught his hand. “Look at me. Listen to me.”_

Eight hours in, and Tony’s hair was finally clean, so Natasha started on his brows and lashes. He resisted her as she tipped his head back over the basin, but she didn’t pause, because doing so was to admit just how important it to him was that they do this.

This wasn’t trivial. It was everything, and it shouldn’t be, but it was. 

_“It’s not just vanity. Your looks are a weapon and a shield in one. And for people like us, who aren’t superhuman or magic or powered, that’s important. Beauty is armor. And it’s ok to feel vulnerable when someone threatens to take that away.”_

She didn’t stop at the eyebrows. She dumped out the seventeenth bucket of contaminated water and then started the methodical process of wiping down the room, cleaning as much as the gunk as she could before stripping off Tony’s oxygen mask and tugging the towel out of his mouth so she could start work on the goatee.

_“You and I fight harder wars than those won and lost on the battlefield. Because we take on the fights that can’t be won, behind the curtain, through smiles and touch and favors. That’s power. We work for it, we earn it, and we haven’t always used it for good, but we’re trying to. And we know how quickly it can all be taken away.”_

Even when the tar was completely gone, Natasha didn’t stop.

_“But it won’t be. Ever. I’d stop anyone who ever even tried.”_

She shampooed his hair, now careful as possible as she moved over his tortured scalp, once, twice, three, four times, until at last some shine began to return, even as he whimpered as the chemicals washed over the tiny but numerous cuts on the raw skin beneath.

_“No one will ever break you, Tony. I won’t let them. Because I know you’d do the same for me. I never thought I’d have a place in the world, let alone a home, but you gave me one. You’re iron and I’m marble.”_

She shaped the goatee and trimmed the eyebrows and then left without looking back. Because beauty was a weapon for both of them, as well as a defense, and acknowledgment of that fact blunted the edges of their instruments.

They had never talked about that night again, and they weren’t going to talk about this. They didn’t need to.

They knew.

He was iron and she was marble, and together, they were unbreakable.

**Author's Note:**

> The Whumptoberverse will continue in [We Didn't Start the Fire](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27487771/chapters/67211023)
> 
> You can check out my other Tony & Natasha one shot [Here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23324716)
> 
> Come scream at me on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/jinxquickfoot), especially if you also write fanfic or do fanart! Share your work with me!
> 
> Thank you so much for all the birthday messages yesterday! It was so lovely to hear from all of you and it really made my day :)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Hair is Everything](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28554231) by [sophinisba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba)




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